Micropolítica: Cartografias do desejo

Suely Rolnik justifies her constant migration from one field of knowledge to another by arguing that '... what I was searching for was in none of them.' Her interest in what she calls the 'politics of desire' or 'micro-politics' grew out of her understanding that 'the colonial experience... was the repression of the body's knowledge, which was present in the cultures who founded Brazil, namely the African, native Indian and the Jewish-Arab cultures. Thus the primordial resistance, from a micro-political perspective, consists in summoning this knowledge.'

Molecular Revolution in Brazil

Yes, I believe that there is a multiple people, a people of mutants, a people of potentialities that appears and disappears, that is embodied in social, literary, and musical events.... I think that we're in a period of productivity, proliferation, creation, utterly fabulous revolutions from the viewpoint of this emergence of a people. That's molecular revolution: it isn't a slogan or a program, it's something that I feel, that I live....
—from Molecular Revolution in Brazil

Following Brazil's first democratic election after two decades of military dictatorship, French philosopher Felix Guattari traveled through Brazil in 1982 with Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik and discovered an exciting, new political vitality. In the infancy of its new republic, Brazil was moving against traditional hierarchies of control and totalitarian regimes and founding a revolution of ideas and politics. Molecular Revolution in Brazil documents the conversations, discussions, and debates that arose during the trip, including a dialogue between Guattari and Brazil's future President Luis Ignacia Lula da Silva, then a young gubernatorial candidate. Through these exchanges, Guattari cuts through to the shadowy practices of globalization gone awry and boldly charts a revolution in practice.

Assembled and edited by Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil is organized thematically; aphoristic at times, it presents a lesser-known, more overtly political aspect of Guattari's work. Originally published in Brazil in 1986 as Micropolitica: Cartografias do desejo, the book became a crucial reference for political movements in Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s. It now provides English-speaking readers with an invaluable picture of the radical thought and optimism that lies at the root of Lula's Brazil.

Alfredo Jaar: Venezia, Venezia

                                             Alfredo Jaar, "Venezia, Venezia", Chile Pavillion, Venice biennale, 2013.

" [...] What Venezia, Venezia offers is of a different caliber. Its aim is to set before us, to make evident, the complete obsolence of such ways of representing the global powers- and thence too of the place assigned to all other countries, naturally including Chile. The work on dislay in the Chilean pavillion submerges the old hegemonies of the former great powers and makes the critical faculty an unfettered excercise in freedom, an excercise in power rather than submission, an invitation to participate in thought emanating from every conceivable part of the world and coming together at this Biennale and in the catalogue of the pavilion of Chile. And where, if not in art, can we hope for this broad global space of horizontal communication and free thought to be created?

The work in this national pavilion is contemporary, challenging and empowered, but not aggressive: slow, phantasmal and fluid, it is the metaphor that reveals the action of a different set of powers, in which the jostling for inclusion and exclusion between countries, territories and peoples goes on, sometimes dramatically, but with different logics.

In these circumestances, awarness of national feeling, of a possible "national identity," can be seen as an ongoing process, a collective, always active work in progress, invariably in relation to a country's history and the shifting global circumstances in which it takes place. An incessant producing of itself. It is thus akin, metaphorically at least, to the pioneering concept of autopoiesis that was put forward in Chile in the 1970s by two Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and that has since exerted intellectual influence around the world."

Adriana Valdés

Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Water Between

Renée Green, "Endless Dreams and Water Between", details of the installation, 2008.


'Endless Dreams and Water Between' is a project by the artist Renée Green, commissioned by the National Maritime Museum. The material cultures of maritime history are intertwined with desires and dreams that are carried across the oceans through experience, representation, misrepresentation and projections of past and present.
This exhibition pays attention to the varied ways cultures perceive and conceive of the world. These understandings and perceptions are developed through struggles for happiness, the imaginary, systems for comprehension and dreams, as well as by the pursuit of these very desires. Renée Green has consistently returned to ideas of time and the sea throughout her artistic practice. 'Endless Dreams and Water Between' brings poetics to the ways that islands shape our understanding of our place in the world by taking us on a journey through the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The exhibition opens with three films meditating on what has been imagined and enacted in a world of uncertainty. Each investigates operations of chance, distance, tenuous connection and attempts to imagine ideal forms of existence. Alongside these, 'Endless Dreams and Water Between' draws together four film projections, sound works, banners, diagrams and drawings.

These varied elements include traces of several fictional characters’ reflections upon, and engagement with, islands – sites that are filled with endless dreams. The islands, which are the focus here, are Manhattan, Majorca, islands of the San Francisco Bay, the northern California Pacific rim and San Francisco itself. California was thought to be an island by Westerners for centuries – a misperception based both on its climate and on desires for preferable futures that became projected on to this imagined island state.

Long histories encompassing geological time and the many migrations of life over many bodies of water emerge throughout 'Endless Dreams and Water Between' as Renée Green’s characters follow their various networks of interest, instigated by curiosity and physical encounters in the island locations they inhabit. Every island imagines itself central.

Each of the simultaneously insular and paradoxically cosmopolitan locations presented in 'Endless Dreams and Water Between' perceive of themselves in this way. Renée Green is fascinated by the ways that historical and fictional documents have the ability to reveal contrary versions of dreams and their trajectories amidst surrounding water. Here various stories emerge, overlap and eventually converge.

Some of these stories relate water and islands to time and history in order to frame human actions. Other narratives look to the division of the world into continents as a question rather than an assertion, in the process reconsidering geographical concepts that are often taken for granted.

From the Greeks to the present, generations of Westerners have been fascinated by islands. Over time, Europeans’ perceptions and concerns for islands have shifted from seeing them as imaginary spaces to locations of material and oceanic control – all the while operating as contested places of perceived potential and escape, as tabula rasae are also part of the Western imagination. 'Endless Dreams and Water Between' intertwines these stories of relationships to water and islands with fictional accounts of contemporary island inhabitants and voyagers. Crossing the Mediterranean Sea, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, as well as the Hudson River, San Francisco Bay and the waters of the Balearic Islands, these journeys point to the assumptions, understandings and creation of island-ideas and idea-islands.

(Source: www.rmg.co.uk)

"Plantation Memories" by Grada Kilomba, Part I

Multitudes: A Platform for the Fragile, the Uncertain and the Provisional

                                          The Otolith Group, "Hydra Decapita", still.

MULTITUDES:

Multitudes was founded by members of The Otolith Group in 1998; it is dedicated to the distribution of alternative networks of information on art, culture, tactical media, politics informed by the multiple perspectives of the Global South.

Multitudes contributes to contemporary modes of knowledge production that demands a critical engagement with the political and cultural conditions of the present thereby affirming the potential of intervention within the disorientations of the now.

We offer essays and articles that critique neoliberalism as a global reassertion of class power that operates through the deregulation and privatization of the world's resources, leading to the impoverishment of the majority of the world's people and the simultaneous escalation of racism and nationalism across the globe.

These political and economic modes of power create impossible conditions for life. Multitudes offers a platform for the fragile, the uncertain and the provisional; it provides a space in which questions of race, class, gender and technology can be complicated, reformulated, reimagined and reenvisioned.

The Otolith Group was founded in 2002. Based in London, their work engages with archival materials, with futurity and with the histories of the transnational. The Group sees its work as a series of explorations with image, sound, text, objects and curation that observe different affective and aesthetic registers, allowing for questions of location and disorientation and creating platforms for discussion on contemporary art practice.

Multitudes used to exist on a private list before it was moved onto Yahoo. It will move again soon and evolve to be a more detailed and participatory platform. (Source: otolithgroup.org)